Displaced San Francisco man boogies on Mission Street to get by

Water drips from the sweatshirt he’s wringing onto his black Air Jordans. The shoes are a size too small, and they squeak when he plants his foot on the pavement while tutting, the body-popping dance he does to earn money. Yuzuf’s doesn’t complain, because the sneakers were a gift.

He lived and worked on Mission Street. If you’ve walked between 22nd and 23rd streets in the last four years, you’ve probably passed his home.

It’s gone now, swept away during one of the recent clearing of homeless encampments. Yuzuf’s fort of cardboard boxes, plastic bags and other items — furniture, appliances, clothes — are what you might find discarded on a sidewalk after a neighbor moves out or, in San Francisco, if they were evicted.

Yuzuf was evicted from his spot, and after spending several days with him, I don’t know where he went.

What looked like a scavenger’s haul was really Yuzuf’s mobile home. Every night he moved his tarp-covered belongings against a storefront; every morning he pulled it to the sidewalk, a few steps from the front doors of several businesses.

According to the 2015 San Francisco Homeless Count Report, there are 6,686 homeless San Franciscans and 58% of them — 4,358 — live on the street. Yuzuf was one of the most visible homeless people in the Mission and San Francisco. He was willing to talk about his life, though he was often evasive about specifics.

When asked for his last name, he said, “Uh…X.” (According to a 2013 Mission Local story reporting on a fight he was involved in on Mission Street, his last name is Equiz.) His age? Near 40. What he couldn’t hide was that he lived a life on perpetual display.

Yuzuf, who keeps his long hair in a ponytail and baseball cap, shaved with a razor, using a compact mirror as morning commuters board buses. Some mornings he rinsed and scrubbed the sidewalk, as if it was his yard. He cleaned the grooves with broken chopsticks, the same tool he used to scrape up the pancaked gum that blemishes his dance floor.

This was his home. He told me he couldn’t ever go to a shelter, because he’d have to get rid of his stuff.

“I’m not about to leave a bunch of shit behind that I worked for,” he said, bristling. “It would just be like burning my house. Same thing, just without the fire.”

He didn’t want to lose the baby stroller or the scuffed wooden end table with a wobbly leg that he said he’d maybe get around to fixing. He had various sizes of cardboard boxes folded and stacked inside more cardboard boxes, his version of a rainy day fund. He wouldn’t say what, if anything, was in the boxes.

“Just recyclables. My own personal belongings,” he began. “My stuff for my kids, books. I don’t go too much into detail.”

When it rained, he hid valuables under his tarps and he ran, like everyone else in the city, for cover. Somehow he hasn’t scavenged an umbrella.

“I don’t want to tell too much,” he said when asked about how long he left his home unattended. “The wrong person hears that, and… I try to be somewhere close by so I can see my stuff.”

The streets were always watching. Here’s what could be seen on most days: a laptop, iPod, amplifier, a vacuum. It made him a target of other homeless people.

“A lot of them are jealous or are haters,” Yuzuf said. “I usually try to ignore them.”

When I brought up the car seat and kid’s bike with a helmet on the handlebar, he said it was for his son. He hasn’t seen his son, who had probably already outgrown the present, in several years. He has a daughter, too. They live somewhere in San Francisco with their mother. Their ages?

“Ten…and seven. I think,” he responded.

He didn’t want to share their names — or the names of people in San Francisco related to him. He does say that two of his three brothers are in prison. The third he doesn’t talk to. Yuzuf has been to jail for “a lot of bullshit.”

He’s not involved in bullshit these days, which is why at least one of his former neighbors didn’t mind his presence.

“I don’t have a problem with the guy and his boxes of stuff,” said Jorge Garcia, who owns El Tepeyac Joyeria, a jewelry store. “I don’t care.”

El Tepeyac is gone now, too. But when I visited Garcia not long ago, a Toy Poodle yapped as we talked through the store’s iron bars. Garcia’s friend, who leaned on the counter counting money, dropped a bill on the floor. Of course, Garcia noticed. He noticed a lot, like when police officers paid Yuzuf a visit.

“When they saw me with a camera, they gave respect to him,” Garcia, who speaks passionately about the displacement of families in the Mission, said. “He’s part of the community. Where’s the public service?”

Yuzuf has been roaming Mission Street off and on for almost 10 years. He used to spend his days outside the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts before retiring with his two carts to bunk outside the old Mission Theater. He stopped making the daily commute because of El Tepeyac’s speaker, which he used to pop and tut. He soon started doing chores, like painting the store’s facade. That was before the Jerry Garcia mural.

Yuzuf didn’t see his stuff as garbage, and he was vehement about being labeled a hoarder.

“The capitalist hoard everything. We can’t have anything,” he said. “They’re the biggest thieves. They’re the biggest hoarders on the planet. They don’t want you to have anything.”

DJ Khaled couldn’t have said it better.

On a sunny weekday afternoon, Yuzuf’s jeans and T-shirts were drying on his tarp. His flannel Lucky Brand boxers dried next to a knit hair scrunchy on top of a towel that was also sunbathing after being washed. The bucket he used to soap his clothes was near the curb next to a plastic take-out container piled with orange peels. The acid from oranges was used for scent.

An older man rolled up pushing an ice cream cart. They spoke a few words in Spanish before he handed Yuzuf a milk crate. The man turned and ambled off, the cart’s bells ringing as gingerly as he walked.

“He’s going in. I’ll watch it for him until tomorrow,” said Yuzuf, who later took a nap sitting on the crate, his head resting in the crook of his folded arm.

He sat on the crate to eat a slice of mushroom from Serrano’s, one of his favorite places to eat. He folded the grease-stained paper bag that covered the pizza into a neat square as small as a Post-it.

“I’ll either use it or toss it in recycling,” he said.

He’s got a lot of recycling — trash bags puffy with bottles, and grocery bags filled with paper.

“I’ll sell them or give them to someone else,” he said about the bottles. “I’m not in any rush. I don’t try to sell nothing unless someone asks.”

[Thanks for reading. See a video of Yuzuf here. This story originally appeared on ripple.co. If you like what you read, please check out more of Ripple’s stories.]